Saturday, February 8, 2025
At long last, Suffolk County has a county executive who fully understands the need to send treated wastewater back into the underground water table that is Long Islanders’ sole source of potable water, instead of dumping it in nearby water bodies including the Atlantic Ocean. And Ed Romaine has legislative support.
The passage of a referendum in November’s election provided the funding to do this. The measure amended the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act, and increased the county sales tax by one-eighth of a cent to raise money to build sewers and install high-tech innovative/alternative septic systems and fund, as the measure stated, “projects for the reuse of treated effluent.”
Last month, at the Bergen Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, in West Babylon, Romaine announced that wastewater from the plant would be used to irrigate an adjacent county golf course, and within the plant. It was built to serve the Southwest Sewer District and send 30 million gallons of treated wastewater a day through an outfall pipe and out into the Atlantic.
As a Suffolk legislator and Brookhaven town supervisor, Romaine repeatedly emphasized the need to send treated wastewater back into the underground water table. “This,” he said at Bergen Point, “is one of 10 county wastewater treatment plants that we are currently considering for water reuse. By utilizing what otherwise would have been a byproduct, we can decrease the pressure on our aquifer by hundreds of millions of gallons a year and even help recharge the aquifer.”
In 2016, treated effluent from the Riverhead Sewage Treatment plant began being used to irrigate the adjacent Indian Island County Golf Course instead of dumping it into the Peconic River. Romaine intends to have all sewer systems built in Suffolk recharge wastewater. “We’re not as stupid as they were years ago,” he said, “where all they did was take that outfall pipe and send (wastewater) out to the ocean or the Long Island Sound.”
Legislator Steven Flotterson, of West Islip, the deputy presiding officer, said, “Bergen Point is just one of the many sites where a golf course is close to a treatment plant. But golf course irrigation is just one example of ways in which we are now moving forward together.”
Five decades ago, as the Southwest Sewer District was taking form, I wrote extensively about the folly of sending a massive amount of wastewater daily into the Atlantic. Leading opponents of the scheme were Charlie Pulaski, conservation chairman of the Suffolk County American Legion, and George A. King, chairman of the Long Island Baymen’s Association. They warned of adverse impacts to many streams, Carlls River and the Great South Bay.
In recent times, the Islip-based Seatuck Environmental Association advanced a Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan. The 2023 plan identified 50 golf courses in Nassau and Suffolk that were within two miles of wastewater treatment facilities and thus available for recharge, along with other locations including “sod farms and greenhouses, as well as for lawns at educational campuses” and “commercial centers.”
The plan can be viewed through a box titled Water Reuse at Seatuck’s website, seatuck.org. Its Executive Summary states,
“Over the past half century, water quality in Long Island’s groundwater aquifers … as well as both freshwater and coastal surface waters, has steadily declined … During this same time period, Long Island’s water quantity problem has also come into focus.”
The U.S. Geological Survey released an 83-page hydrology report last year about the water table beneath Nassau County — which is 88 percent sewered, with sewage treatment plants dumping wastewater into adjacent water bodies — which said that the water table is now “under stress” with saltwater intruding as freshwater is being depleted.
In the late 1800s, Brooklyn lost its potable underground water supply by over-pumping from the water table below it and the consequent saltwater intrusion, along with pollution — and became dependent on a now fully subscribed upstate reservoir system. Losing potable water cannot be allowed to happen to the rest of Long Island.
Now Romaine and Suffolk legislators are tackling the vital water supply issue.
Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at SUNY Old Westbury, host of the TV program “Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman” and the author of six books.
